I plan to take photos of birds that may be as far as 100m with my FZ200 tomorrow morning. I usually use Shutter Priority mode. I cannot find anything for EZ when in SP mode but found iZoom. If I select iZoom, is the 12MP RW2 file unmodified if I zoom beyond 24x? I've only tried optical 24x but distant birds occupy too few pixels to make good web photos. Do you think turning on iZoom and going to 48x might slightly improve my chances to get a useable distant bird image. I know there's no substitute for getting closer but occasionally that's not an option.

EZ is just what you get automatically when you decrease the picture size from the default 12mp value to some lower value. It's a sensor crop (when you save as JPG). When you save as JPG+Raw, it's a remapping of the full sensor to a smaller number of pixels, so you don't get more than "24x" on the display.

With iZoom (which I think is a good choice) the JPG uses the cropped sensor and upsamples it to 12mpx if the displayed zoom is >24x. Under those conditions the .RW2 contains the cropped file - so you get a 2k by 1.5k raw image if you're at 48x.

Sherm

If both EZ and iZoom create reduced-sized RW2 files when zoom >24x, I agree iZoom seems the better choice for distant objects. It also seems the RW2 file would be of less value with either EZ or iZoom than if I continue to just take 12MP jpg+raw photos.